Thursday, August 17, 2017

“On balance, I don’t see any particular dangers from greenhouse warming. {Humans do} influence climate to some extent, what we do with land-use changes and what we put into the atmosphere. But I don’t think it’s a large enough impact to dominate over natural climate variability.”
. . .
“The collapse of the consensus on cholesterol and heart disease – that one collapsed overnight. I can only hope that sanity will eventually prevail with the climate problem as well.”

President Donald Trump will rescind an Obama administration policy requiring government agencies to take into account global warming-induced flooding and sea level rise for federally-funded projects.

Trump will repeal the climate order that President Barack Obama signed in 2015 as part of a broader effort to streamline infrastructure permitting. Administration officials said the current process is long and cumbersome.

“For far too long, critical projects have been delayed by duplicative permitting and environmental requirements which added time and unnecessary expenses to much needed projects,” Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said in a statement obtained by Bloomberg.

Trump wants to push a $200 billion infrastructure spending bill through Congress this fall, which he hopes will mobilize $800 billion in state and private funding. A cumbersome permitting process could hold up infrastructure projects.

Furthermore, Obama’s executive order to “improve the resilience of communities and federal assets against the impacts of flooding” could increase the upfront costs or even eliminate projects in the pipeline.

Now look at the data on sea level rise from Baltimore (one of the longest US records):

No hint of a modern acceleration of sea level rise due to global warming. There's nothing to take into account.

That said, it's not a bad idea to put your houses and other buildings above the reach of flooding. But if you want to, you should be prepared to pay for it yourself when it floods, or buy a flood insurance policy based on an appropriate probability of damage, not one subsidized by the feds.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

St. Johns County deputies arrested a woman after she bit a man's fishing line and swam off with his lure, according to a police report.

Deputies were called to the St. Johns County Pier on Tuesday at approximately 6 p.m. A fisherman told deputies that 22-year-old Alexandria Turner appeared to be intoxicated when she swam up to his fishing line and cursed him out.

She bit the line and swam away with the rigging, according to the police report.

When deputies asked Turner to come to the pier office where the fisherman had rented the pole, she became belligerent and refused to walk inside, the report said. Deputies said Turner began creating a scene and upsetting the "sense of public norm at the pier" when they tried to take her into protective custody.

She refused to let deputies handcuff her and screamed, "I'm (expletive) naked!" several times, the report said. Deputies arrested Turner on suspicion of disorderly intoxication and resisting arrest without violence.

A physics researcher at the University of Washington says the controversial Google memo is just the latest example of “shoddy science” that is “conducted primarily by white men.”

“It’s 2017, and to some extent scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s,” physics Research Associate Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein complained in a Slate op-ed last week, written in response to the memo in which former Google employee James Damore criticized the company’s efforts to effect gender diversity.

Specifically, Prescod-Weinstein takes issue with the contention—related to her by a “well-known scientist”—that “the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains,” arguing that “peer-reviewed” is not synonymous with “correct.”

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that, rather than placing value in the contents of peer-reviewed scientific articles, we should recognize that “science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias” and is “conducted primarily by white men.”

I hope she will deny herself all the benefits of science, like modern medicine, antibiotics, and any other treatments created by men.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has ordered the statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who found in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that a slave had no right to sue for his freedom, removed from the grounds of the state house.

His 2018 challenger for the governor's seat, former NAACP president Ben Jealous, claimed that Hogan was making a political move a day after Jealous gave a statement in front of the Taney statue calling for its removal.

Taney, who was born in Calvert County, wrote in the 7-2 opinion for the majority that the framers of the Constitution regarded blacks "as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

"...It is obvious that they were not even in the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they were conferring special rights and privileges upon the citizens of a State in every other part of the Union. Indeed, when we look to the condition of this race in the several States at the time, it is impossible to believe that these rights and privileges were intended to be extended to them."

Hogan said this evening that Maryland "has always been a state of middle temperament, which is a guiding principle of our administration."

Roger Brooke Taney was born on March 17, 1777 in Calvert County, Maryland, the son of Monica (Brooke) and Michael Taney. He was the second son, and the third of seven children (four sons and three daughters) born to a slaveholding family of tobacco planters in Calvert County, Maryland. He received a rudimentary education from a series of private tutors. After instructing him for a year, his last tutor, David English, recommended that Taney was ready for college. At the age of 15 he entered Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, graduating with honors in 1795. As a younger son with no prospect of inheriting the family plantation, Taney chose the profession of law. He read law with Judge Jeremiah Townley Chase and was admitted to the bar in 1799. He quickly distinguished himself as one of Maryland's most promising young lawyers.

He couldn't be a Republican, because the modern Republican Party had not yet come into existence.

Taney, a Jacksonian Democrat, was made Chief Justice by Jackson. He inherited slaves from his father but manumitted them and gave pensions to the older ones. He believed that power and liberty were extremely important and if power became too concentrated, then it posed a grave threat to individual liberty. He opposed attempts by the national government to regulate or control matters that would restrict the rights of individuals. From Prince Frederick, Maryland, he had practiced law and politics simultaneously and succeeded in both. After abandoning the Federalist Party as a losing cause, he rose to the top of the state's Jacksonian machine. As Attorney General (1831–1833) and then Secretary of the Treasury (1833–1834), and as a prominent member of the Kitchen Cabinet, Taney became one of Jackson's closest advisers, assisting Jackson in his populist crusade against the powerful Bank of the United States.

Time to remove the statue of the man who ordered Japanese orphans interned at Manzanar from his memorial in Washington D.C. Or maybe we should just remove the whole memorial.

The Department of Justice is reportedly planning to redirect money earmarked for civil-rights enforcement and spend it on action against universities that allegedly “discriminate against white applicants” by adhering to affirmative-action policies.

The New York Times cites an internal document sent to the department’s civil-rights division that asks staff lawyers to work on a new project involving “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university ­admissions.”

Conservatives, who have long fought affirmative action, hailed the project as “long overdue.”

... one of the stranger lawsuits in recent memory comes to a close. The DJ who sued a pop star to supposedly regain his reputation ended up proving her case to the jury without her attorney calling a single witness. A Denver jury sided with Taylor Swift, who countersued and accused David Mueller of sexual assault, and awarded her the symbolic single dollar she demanded:

Doug Baldridge, Swift’s lawyer, countered that eight witnesses saw the assault, and that Mueller lost his job because “he grabbed her butt and got caught. Now he’s victimizing her again to save his butt.”